Comparing Maturity in Separate Peace and All Quiet on the Western Front :: comparison compare contrast essays

Maturity in A Separate two-eyed violet and exclusively chill out on the Western Front The evolution of a child to adult is a long and complex make. There is some other transitional tempo that goes in the middle of these two periods. In militant terms, such as those used in the settings of Erich Maria Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front and John Knowless A Separate Peace, that step could be classified as being a soldier. W.N. Hodgson acknowledges this progression as well, in the poem Before Action. The speaker begs first for God to enlighten him a soldier (line 8) and then once he is a soldier he asks God to make him a man (16). Soldiers arent quite children anymore theyve seen too much pain, death, and horror to maintain their innocence as children do. However, they arent very men yet either. In A Separate Peace and All Quiet on the Western Front, the characters all go through this process of growing up, where they begin as children and proceed on to being soldiers, in the long run emerging as strong, insightful men by the end of the book. The characters in A Separate Peace are first seen as children. gene and Phineas (or Finny), the main characters in A Separate Peace, are first portray as regular teenageage boys, full of life, energy, and humor. Ready to find mutation in everything, the boys even make games out of the war, including the Super Suicide confederation of the Summer Session (Knowles 24) and blitzball (Knowles 29). They jump out of trees as a military reserve for jumping out of a plane and throw a good turn ball around, pretending that its a bomb. People perceive them as reckless and wild and perhaps even a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve (Knowles 17). They go through things that everyone experiences as a teen jealousy, peer pressure, and competition. They dont know very much about the war or about life itself. Finny even blatantly denies the existence of the war, saying that the expatiate old men who dont want them crowding up their jobs have cooked up this war fake (Knowles 107). One of the boys in their class, Leper, dreams of enlisting in the move troops, seeing it as a safe, clean way to get regard in the war rather than having to kill and destroy.